working in spaces
One of the big things we’ve discussed in thinking about camp and workshops is how to take informal spaces (living rooms, church basements, kitchens) and turn them into productive learning environments. Roughly speaking, thinking about how something like “classroom design” applies when you take out the classroom, take out the teachers, and try to give people space to do their own thing.
I teach freshman writing at a local university, and taught the past semester in a computer lab. It was a strange environment – a combination of equipment I didn’t quite know how to use (overhead projector + whiteboard + manager’s desk) and an intimidating seating arrangement. There were no tables to speak of – instead, we had concentric rings of computer desks, equipped with Myspace and Facebook, all facing away from the front of the room.
Using computers to teach writing is a potentially useful thing – having the internet at your fingertips isn’t just a time sink, after all, it’s an incredible research tool. It’s easier to illustrate points when everyone has Google on hand, and having actual workstations meant that in-class writing was a snap. In this case, though the classroom was filled with objects that had little to no immediate relevance to what we were doing. Computers stifle discussion. I couldn’t see everyone in the room. When someone was talking, other people had to crane to see them. Nobody was quite sure of whether we were in a lecture room or a seminar room. People stopped talking, and they started getting frustrated. They gotanxious and bored, and then (not unlike a roomful of 10-year-olds) they started to get destructive.
Not all of this is due to classroom setup, of course, but a lot of it had to do with me, and how comfortable I felt in the space. Ideally, teaching writing should be a lot like camp – it’s a relatively self-directed process, based around making stuff, experimenting, thinking analytically, and “finding your voice” (whatever you take that to mean, which is, in any case, something specific and important). Taking the classroom out of freshman writing is hard, in part, because there’s no group of people who is more eager for structure and organization. This is true of the space as much as the teaching. If people aren’t sure whether they’re in a seminar or a lecture, they’ll revert to the lecture – they get passive, and sit back, and wait for you to give them the answers. It falls on the instructor to possess and occupy the space, and clearly define its use.
I gave up on the space very early on – I decided that it wasn’t going to work, taking the lack of a seminar table as my starting cue. “You can’t teach writing if it’s not a seminar,” I said. I stopped trying to run a discussion when everyone was literally facing away from me and got used to watching people surf the internet. I never figured out what to do with the computers – and as a result, they became a much bigger deal than they needed to be.
This was on my mind during camp because we tried something new for the week: the day prior to starting camp, we opted not to unpack any of the stuff. Instead, we left everything in bags and decided to let the kids make the space themselves. The plan didn’t quite work, either: everyone showed up simultaneously, half of us (the counsellors) were sick, kids arrived early, everything became chaotic quickly. Everything got unpacked simultaneously and put in random places, and was only sort of reorganized after the fact. Consequently, nothing really had a home – instead of designated rooms, there were floating piles of stuff. A bag of tools here, a cluster of glue guns there. In lieu of planned spaces, we hadtemporary spots where people left them and picked them up again.
It also meant that computers floated freely through the space. The second day, one of the kids declared that what was functioning as the computer room was “too crowded” and took it upon himself to free up the space, designating a corner of the soldering table as the Linux station. Two days later, I looked up and noticed that the Scratch desk and soldering station had moved to the back room by the kitchen. The next day the laptop in a different place, often being carried from one table to another, with kids scrounging for cables to stop ailing battery life. Sometimes it was at the craft table; sometimes it was back by the kitchen. The quiet zone of focus that goes along with looking at a computer – whether playing with Scratch, checking Myspace, or playing video games – also moved. Instead of static space, it became portable – a tiny zone of quiet, where every day, a different kid was sitting and working quietly in the midst of chaos.
Portable space is something I feel like we don’t talk about a whole lot – in talking about classroom design, the emphasis is always on open space, on seeing, communicating, being able to talk freely (the seminar table, the open air classroom). Watching kids take computers around made me wonder if I’d gotten it backwards – that maybe it wasn’t that computers are this necessary impediments (distractions), but that distractions themselves offer a particular kind of focus. Floating computers made for a weird kind of mobility – it makes the space autonomous, but more than that, makes it chaotic, with computers set against this intensely social background of “the rest of camp.”
Portability is essential to allowing allowing that kind of juxtaposition, and allowing a place for chaos that doesn’t exist in the space of the static computer lab. It made me wonder: is it just that it’s fun to move around? That it’s nice not to have “classrooms” or “craft rooms” or “computer labs”? Or maybe what happens when you take computers out of the computer lab is, actually, a much more private and intentional space – that this juxtaposition is really essential to developing focus, and being able to function in natural, unconstructed spaces, wherever you happen to find them.